Part of the healing work of the Holy Spirit is to attend to our needs, the bruises and wounds of our souls. But we must examine what needs Jesus’s attention. How can He most heal the hurts in your hearts in order that we are emptied and can let go of anything that would obstruct the outpouring of His Spirit?

If we’re wrestling with something unresolved, or disturbed, or in any way disrupting the tranquility of your soul, it can in a sense, occupy the space in our soul, that God in His presence wants to embrace. We need to empty ourselves, first and foremost, when we show up before God. The Penitential Rite at the beginning of the Mass is meant to help us empty ourselves, so that we may be filled with the lavishing of God’s love with the outpouring of the Spirit.

A unique translation of Saint Teresa’s bookmark was done by a Carmelite Friar named Father Anselm. This is how he translates that passage which is so precious to many of us:

All things pass, save God, who does not changeBe patient, and at last, thou shalt of all, fulfillment find.Hold God, and nought shall fail thee.For He alone is all.

This translation is so different that it’s hard to grasp it all in at once. Let’s look at it and the perspective of faith that it is offering us on how to clear our minds. Emptying our souls will inevitably involve clearing our minds of things we just need to cut the strings from: fear, worrying, considerations of your histories, your human relationships with each other. Just let the healing forgiveness of God’s heart help you to let go of everything.

The perspective that this prayer offers is God’s perspective of what is eternal in comparison to what is temporal. All things will change. Our moods will change. Our feelings are always in change. Our emotions are not the foundation of our faith because like the waves of the ocean, they are always in motion. Unreliable. Our faith is not about feelings. It involves feelings, at times, but that’s not the foundation that keeps us firm. Even when we’re feeling sad, desolate, or that God is distant, that is not a sign. Most often, for those who are faithful, those who are truly striving to stay in the state of grace, when we experience the darkness, that is not a sign that God’s love for us has changed. But it sure feels like it. Yeah it does, of course.

God does not change. His feelings aren’t up and down. We change all the time. When we see each other, we think ‘Oh, I haven’t seen this person in a long time, in four years. We used to belong to the same community but now we’re in two different branches and I haven’t seen him in a long time. Why did I get that reaction? Why didn’t I get a more joyful reaction? Why didn’t she smile when she saw me? Why did she look away? Why didn’t he greet me the way he greeted the other person?’ All this stinking thinking of comparing one another can enter into our heads, and it becomes distractions. It’s normal, it’s not sinful, we’re complex human beings and we need to be set free from those things.

For those of you who are married, sometimes, your spouse might get home and he or she is in a bad mood, and you don’t know why. You wonder, ‘Did I say something wrong? Did I do something? What’s going on?’ We immediately think that there’s something wrong with us because we’re not getting the affirmation or the response that builds us up.

When I’m feeling that way spiritually, down or distant from God, not consoled and distracted in prayer, I’m quick to presume that I must have done something wrong to deserve this. We need to move beyond those very human and earth-bound interpretations of our spiritual lives. We need to be set free from that by a deeper encounter with God’s Mercy. This encounter requires a lot of patience. “Patience obtains all things.” Through this encounter we discover true fulfillment and that “God alone suffices.” We don’t need to worry about all these lesser things. We don’t need to spend our energy, our attention, or our time, dwelling on these lesser things, putting third things first and first things third.

“God alone suffices.” That conviction of how God satisfies our hearts’ deepest longings, what we are made for at our core. The more we experience that reality, the truth of God’s love meeting us in the deepest part of ourselves, the more convinced we are. The more we are able to say with Saint Teresa with joy and utter conviction in the power of the Holy Spirit, Solo Dios Basta! Let it run through your bones. Solo Dios Basta! God alone suffices. He alone is all.

We have to hold on to God, as this translation says. There are times in our lives when all we can do is hold on to Him, and just cling to the cross. A true tree-hugger. Cling to the cross, like Saint Francis. When things get tough cling to the cross. Unite yourself to Him and just hold on. Sometimes, all we can do is just hold on. Jesus says, ‘It’s going to be OK. I know you don’t see past the clouds right now; I know that you don’t see beyond the bloody mess of the sweat, pain, and tears of Calvary in the way that may be expressing itself in your life right now but hold on. It’s going to be OK. Just hold on,’ “and nought shall fail thee for He alone is all.”

God’s miracles of mercy can begin to take shape and be poured out through patient perseverance in faith and not giving; in so doing, we allow God’s love to enlarge our faith and expand our hope to new horizons regarding who He is in us, with us and through us, and around us, and for us. These encounters oftentimes have to happen by passing some kind of crisis. That is the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit’s mission is the miracle of God’s Merciful Love in each of our lives. End

May the Lord bless us, protect us from all evil, and bring us to everlasting life.

An important mystery that is part of all our lives is that as beloved children of God, though we are called to share in the beauty of God, who is Love, that beauty will inevitably involve our being engaged in a spiritual battle. Whenever God has something really big in store to bless our socks off, the enemy tries to interrupt God’s plans. He’s on a leash, but he’ll do everything possible in his power to try to discourage, distract, and sway us from showing up. He can make us sick, he can disrupt relationships at home and at work; he can present all these different obstacles to try, in any way, to discourage us – which is his favorite weapon – and take away our resolve to seek God’s face, though we were once excited to do so for months previously. Finally, when the moment has come, and the week is here, so many things might seem to fall apart. That goes with the territory of seeking the Lord with all of our hearts, minds, and strength.

The Lord desires us to be strengthened in our faiths and in our will, uniting ourselves to His love, that nothing may separate us from the love of God. For that reason, because we do know what it means to experience the good fight of faith and spiritual battle, Saint Teresa’s bookmark speaks strongly to all of us and to many others, Secular Carmelite or not.

Our Holy Mother Saint Teresa’s beautiful bookmark is one of the most commonly known of all of her writings. It’s really an echo of the Lord’s words in the gospel of John. In the Last Supper discourse in Chapters 14 to 17, one of Saint Teresa’s favorite and the favorite of so many of the close friends of God, Jesus pours out His heart. He speaks of the most intimate thing to His friends. He’s trying to build them up, animating them and preparing them for perseverance; to be filled with the Spirit, to not allow any contradiction of the cross or any scandal of suffering to sway them from their purpose in being united to Himself. In building them up, he is preparing them to receive a new outpouring of the Spirit. He tells them not to be afraid. He tells them to allow the impact of the Father’s peace to remain prominent in every problem that they would eventually face.

By communicating the experience of grace to them, Jesus gives us focus on how to remain firm in a faith that is centered in Him. Saint Teresa’s bookmark echoes that essential Easter message that God is with us – in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, in season and out of season, in consolation and desolation. God is with us – in the springtime and in the desert, in the valley and in the mountain, whether in darkness or in the full light of the beautiful pasture – God is with us as the good shepherd (to be continued).

May the Lord bless us, protect us from all evil, and bring us to everlasting life.

Editor’s note: As a reminder, the Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy ends this Sunday, November 20, 2016

In Manuscript B, Saint Thérèse says that love must descend into nothingness and then be consumed by the fire of Love. She’s totally in touch with the truth of her poverty as a creature, as a sinner in need of God’s mercy, of the Savior. She renounced her merits, she renounced any sense of her perfection; she even renounces the glory of heaven as a reward. She wished to be nothing more than emptiness. She embraced her littleness in such a way that she thought of herself as this depth, this pit in which God could pour out His love according to His good pleasure. She became this openness, this capacity to receive His torrents of love by being in touch with the truth of her poverty.

According to the Spanish contemplative monk who wrote The Little Child of God’s Mercy, “She presents herself to God in the truth of her nothingness with empty hands” – as if she had nothing of her own to offer but her littleness as a child. She had nothing to offer but her dependency, her vulnerability. That is what she had to offer. That is her holocaust. She is the host and that is her holocaust.

“She does not wish to lay up merits for heaven.” Her only aim is to give Jesus pleasure by trusting, by surrendering her poverty, by believing that He who is rich became poor in order to enrich our poverty; by offering herself as a sinner, knowing that He came to call sinners and not the righteous. She prefers to be clothed not with any sense of self-righteousness. Not the name I’ve earned for myself or anything else that I can make for myself. Absolutely not. That’s totally foreign to the little way.

“She prefers to be clothed with Jesus’s own justice,” His merits, “to receive from His love the eternal possession of Himself.” This is where St. Thérèse totally captures the heart of the gospel as being sheer grace, total pure gift – not based on works, but based on Jesus’s work. That’s the heart of the gospel and that is also what we believe as Catholic Christians. Our work is only the working out of our faith in love, but it’s not my work as end in itself or as a way of earning God’s love because my work can never earn God’s love. I could never give God something that would make me worthy of Him. That comes as free gift because of who Jesus is, as His gift to us.

“The eternal possession of Himself is the justice of which she wants to be clothed in– namely Jesus.” For Saint Thérèse, says this Spanish monk, “Holiness was not therefore a matter of perfection of the soul. It did not have to become rich in virtues or be arrayed with gifts of grace in order to become an adult” spiritually speaking. Rather, she had to remain as a child.

What does that mean? She would stay in that state of poignant need in which she could only exist in total dependence on Him, into the very real need of being saved at every moment. Thérèse and so many intimate friends of Jesus, like Saint Catherine of Sienna, have expressed that we’re all called to experience salvation by the free gift of God, not because we’re good enough, but because He is good enough and able to give Himself no matter in what stage we are in our spiritual growth.

God wants all of us to experience that we are loved in an irrepeatable, irreplaceable way. Each of us is uniquely loved by the heart of God, as if we were the only one in the world there is to love. God’s total, undivided attention is on each person, the way that only God can do. Nobody else can do that. That’s not humanly possible. That’s only an attribute, a quality of God as God. And He is able to love that big. The God we adore, the one we believe in is a great God; therefore, He has called us to have great faith, and is able to consume us with love.

Thérèse is the prophet of this great faith in such a great God. In Arabic, for both Christian and Arabs, the word for God is Allah. But the greater name for God is Abba – Father. This is the God whom we worship, the God of tenderness beyond our wildest dreams. The God of Merciful Love, is the God for whom St. Thérèse, the prophet, points.

St. Thérèse ’s Act of Oblation was written under the powerful influence of the Holy Spirit. On Trinity Sunday, during Mass, she felt the Divine life boiling up within her. This offering and prayer is the fruit of that experience. She makes the offering two days after she wrote it, with her sister Celine. Five days after she writes this prayer, she was in the choir about pray The Way of the Cross, and she was seized by a special grace which the mystical doctor, Saint John of the Cross, calls ‘a wound of love.’

She describes, “All of a sudden I was seized by so violent a love for the good God that it was as if somebody had immersed me entirely in fire. Aaah, what fire and what sweetness at one and the same time. I was burning with love and I felt that if it lasted one minute or one second more, I couldn’t have borne this heat without dying.” This is a similar experience as that of Saint Francis, Saint Teresa, and so many other friends of God.

Less than a year later after writing her Oblation, around Holy Week, she entered her own Way of the Cross, her total assimilation to her beloved’s passion. “Throughout the thick darkness of this passive night of the spirit which lasted for the last eighteen months of her life, Thérèse took extreme care to not communicate to others in the community the doubts which assailed her.” According to the bold expression of Saint Paul ‘Him who knew no sin, God has identified with the sin of man for us.’ Jesus became sin and was immersed in it in order to free us from it.

“So too, Thérèse, the redeemer’s bride, entered into this logic. She became sin, [or more exactly, misery] destined to be immersed in the abyss of infinite Mercy. This also meant entering into the greater sharing of Jesus’s redemption; namely, willingly accepting being plunged into the abyss of dereliction and suffering into which her bridegroom was plunged.”

Thérèse definitely had a mission that she was going to accomplish after her life on earth. The preparation for this heavenly mission on earth was this profound experience of the cross as the apex of her conversion and vocation. This profound sharing of the cross was to prepare the way for the harvest which she was to accomplish, that God would accomplish in her, with her, and through her in heaven upon earth. According to some authors, when Saint Thérèse wrote her Oblation to Merciful Love which was around the same time she wrote Mansucript B, she was already in the heights of spiritual life, the seventh mansion. Her Oblation to Merciful Love was on June 9, 1895 and she begins Manuscript B on September 8, 1896, over a year later. She dies just a year over that.

When she writes Manuscript B, she is already in her dark night of the soul. She had already begun her spiritual and physical sufferings, the hemorrhages and temptations against faith. In Manuscript B, the masterpiece of all her writing, she talks about her vocation of love as Heaven’s child, like a little eagle on the wings of the Divine eagle. She has the prophetic insight into her mission to ask to receive a double portion of all the saints, that she may gather a legion of little souls worthy of Infinite love.

To conclude with the words of Saint Thérèse, at the end of Manuscript A, “Love penetrates and surrounds me. Each moment, this merciful love renews me. What I am certain about is that God’s mercy will accompany me always.” And as she says in her Act of Oblation to Merciful Love, “Oh my God, since you loved me so much as to give me your only Son as my Savior and my Spouse, the infinite treasures of His merits are mine. Look upon me only in the face of Jesus and in His Heart burning with love.” END

When the archangel Gabriel appeared to Our Lady, after honoring what God had done in her soul and calling her full of grace, one of the first things he told Mary was not to be afraid. This is a strong message in all of sacred scripture, a theme, a golden thread from Genesis to Apocalypse. Do not be afraid, says the Lord.

At the end of Manuscript A, the first of her three manuscripts in A Story of a Soul, Thérèse says, “I am far from being on the way of fear.” In other words, she says, ‘I’m not afraid of God.’ Similarly, Padre Pio says, “El miedo es un mal peor que el mismo mal.” Fear is an evil worst than evil itself because fear oftentimes projects a false reality. We can easily become afraid of something that hasn’t already happened. Fear is just a total imagination, a trip of the mind. It’s not even real. Fear is a phantom, a shadow. It’s smoke, nothing that’s even really substantial.

Thérèse writes, “I always find a way to be happy and to profit from my miseries.” ‘No matter what happens I find a way to bring good out of it.’ This is a theme from Romans 8:28. She continues, “How sweet is the way of love,” rather than the way of fear. As Saint John says, ‘Perfect love casts out all fear.’ Thérèse says, “True, one can fall or commit infidelities, but love knows how to draw profit from everything.” In other words, God can use anything to bring out good. There are no obstacles to God’s Mercy to use as material to draw us closer to Himself and to sanctify us.

Thérèse says that even if there are fallings and infidelities, “Love quickly consumes everything that can be displeasing to Jesus. It leaves nothing but a humble and profound peace in the depth of the heart.” If you’ve ever read The Name of God is Mercy, we see many of these themes in Pope Francis, a person who really knows Thérèse deeply and who is very much in the school of Saint Thérèse.

Like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whom Pope Francis recently canonized, Thérèse refused Jesus nothing. She always gave Him all. She always gave Him everything. In The Little Child of God’s Mercy, the author, a Spanish contemplative monk, writes, “The essential trait of what must make up our response to the Lord’s love is giving oneself without limit.” Generosity. We see this total generosity in Saint Thérèse and this explains how she was able to progress so much spiritually and to be transformed from one degree of God’s love for her to another.

The author continues, “Thérèse’s life would become a continual search for an evermore perfect giving.” She was always looking for the opportunity of giving herself to God. She was always asking, ‘How can I be drawn closer to God in giving myself more deeply to Him.’ She was always findings ways to love Love, to love the God who is Love. He continues, “The only means she found was to give herself up to that love so as to quench with her own, almost infinite thirst, the divine thirst of Jesus. This answer, to quench the thirst of Jesus, was Saint Thérèse’s Offering to Merciful Love.”

Saint Thérèse wrote the Offering to Merciful Love almost a year before she wrote Manuscript B. By her oblation, in her free, total act of the will, with all of her being, once and for all, Thérèse answers the appeal of Love. The oblation is a deepening of her baptism, a deepening of her solemn profession. She makes it definitive. This is her answer to the appeal of Love whose cry, ‘I thirst,’ echoed within her own heart in her desire to make Love loved.

Thérèse’s middle name is Francis, one of the top five all-time greatest saints loved by the world, and she really has his spirit. He was a seraphic little man, so on fire with Jesus Christ, and mirrored the life of Jesus almost more than someone as great as Saint Paul and Saint John the beloved disciple of Jesus. Francis often said, ‘Love is not loved. The God who is Love is not loved.’ What an irony! What a contradiction! How can Love not be loved? Thérèse experienced the same passion.

In the Act of Oblation, she surrenders her nothingness with blind trust to the very heart of the all-powerful divine tenderness of God. Her only concern was to give love in return for Love. As Saint John of the Cross says, ‘Love is repaid by love alone.’ She felt her supreme misery, her own impoverishment; she had nothing to offer to God, who is all-holy, all mighty in majesty. The Spanish author of The Little Child of God’s Mercy, writes, “Her felt depth of the abyss of her own misery, such that one feels and is so empty of self [everything that can be sacrificed of oneself is sacrificed], she places this with abandonment on the waves of Mercy’s tenderness. Her dispositions were those of total poverty”(to be continued).

“And who is my neighbor?” 30Jesus replied, “A man fell victim to robbers as he went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. They stripped and beat him and went off leaving him half-dead. 31 A priest happened to be going down that road, but when he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side. 32Likewise a Levite came to the place, and when he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side. 33But a Samaritan traveler who came upon him was moved with compassion at the sight. 34He approached the victim, poured oil and wine over his wounds and bandaged them. Then he lifted him up on his own animal, took him to an inn and cared for him. 35The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper with the instruction, ‘Take care of him. If you spend more than what I have given you, I shall repay you on my way back.’ 36Which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?” 37He answered, “The one who treated him with mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

In the story of the Good Samaritan: God does not pass us like the priest and the Levite but rather like the Samaritan; God comes to us where we are. He sees our weakness; he sees our brokenness and our misery. Then He acts to heal us and bring us to a place of comfort and to rest. Remember God says, ‘Come to me all who are weary and I will give you rest.’

Therefore, the first step to being saved, the first step to recovering, to discover recovery in our broken humanity is to have humility. We must realize our need for Him and that we cannot heal ourselves much less save ourselves. We must have the humility to be free of being in denial, thinking that we have the power to do it all on our own, and that we are sufficient left to ourselves. To discover recovery, is to have the humility to ask God for help, to ask God for healing, and to ask God to save us.

Father Gaitley says: “Divine Mercy is God’s being moved to compassion at seeing our suffering and then God taking action to help alleviate it. And so, The Little Way, is about the compassion of Jesus who sees the suffering of little souls who long to attain the heights of holiness but who are too little to climb the rough stairway of perfection. The Little Way is about the action of Jesus who reaches down out of pity and picks us up, trusting little souls, to place us in the heights.”

The emphasis and focus is Jesus’ action of Divine Mercy and our most important and necessary response is trust. Trust enough to allow God to act in your lives, and to allow God to make the difference. This trust requires the daily ‘I do’ to hold on to the Lord, and to hold on when there might seem like a lack of results. It requires us to not give in, and to not let go of trusting.

Father Gaitley says, “The elevator that Thérèse refers to is the Mercy of Jesus [the Mercy of Jesus in action.] It is the compassion of Jesus reaching out to lift up the lowly.” These words return again to the heart of sacred scripture which is saturated in Mercy. St Thérèse points God’s Mercy out in a remarkable passage at the end of her autobiography. This section weaves together her favorite truths of the gospel that she has rediscovered, the truths that she then helps us to discover.

St Thérèse writes, “I have only to cast a glance in the gospels and immediately I breathe in the perfumes of Jesus’ life. And I know on which side to run. I don’t hasten to the first place but to the last. Rather than advance like the Pharisee, I repeat filled with confidence the publican’s humble prayer. Most of all, I imitate the conduct of Magdalene, her astonishing or rather her loving audacity, which charms the heart of Jesus, also attracts my own. Yes, I feel it. Even though I had on my conscience all the sins that can be committed, I would go, my heart broken with sorry and throw myself into Jesus’ arms; for I know how much He loves the prodigal child who returns to him.”

St Thérèse is a prophet of Merciful Love. In this Year of Mercy, she is one of the greatest teachers we could possibly listen to who can help us, as Pope Francis encourages, to rediscover the Merciful face of our heavenly Father. What a joy it is to know Jesus as Lord. And an even greater joy that Jesus points us to is to know God as our Father. Thérèse points us to this experience.

In the words of St. Paul, “To the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords who alone has immortality who dwells in unapproachable light; to him be honor and eternal power forever and ever.”

As this Jubilee Year of Mercy draws to a close, we are called to experience the healing of God’s merciful heart that we may rediscover the face of our Father who is merciful, that we ourselves may learn new lessons of mercy and how to share that gift with others as the Lord puts it in our lives.

Let us ask the Lord to help us to be merciful as He is merciful. That we may grow regularly in the grace that sets us free. END

A reading of the Holy Gospel According to Luke: Jesus said to the Pharisees: “There was a rich man who dressed in purple garments and fine linen and dined sumptuously each day. And lying at his door was a poor man named Lazarus covered with sores, who would have gladly eaten his fill of the scraps that fell from the rich man’s table. Dogs even used to come and lick his sores. When the poor man died, he was carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham.The rich man also died and was buried and from the netherworld where he was in torment he raised his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. And he cried out: “Father Abraham have pity on me. Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue for I am suffering torment in these flames.” Abraham replied: “My child, remember that you received what was good during your lifetime while Lazarus likewise received what was bad. But now he is comforted here whereas you are tormented. Moreover, between us and you, a great chasm is established to prevent anyone from crossing who might wish to go from our side to yours or from your side to ours. He said: Then I beg you father, send him to my father’s house, for I have five brothers so that he may warn them lest they too may come to this place of torment. But Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.” He said, “Oh no Father Abraham. But if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent. Abraham said: “If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead. The Gospel of the Lord

This very strong reading is a good example of how ‘the gospel comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.’ You’ve heard that expression before, I am sure. What do we mean by the comfortable? The comfortable, in this context, means the complacent. The complacent are those who are indifferent to the legitimate needs of others around them. The warning we heard about in the first reading from Amos to the complacent in Zion, is to those who didn’t care about or who were insensitive to those who are suffering.

In the commentary in the Magnificat, Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, who is known for editing the Catechism of the Catholic Church, says that “carelessness or self-centeredness is what blinds a person to our neighbor’s need. The rich man in the gospel, who feasts sumptuously, was perhaps not even deliberately cold to Lazarus, who was lying at his door. But rather, he had grown accustomed to seeing him there. His wealth and comfortable life made him insensitive to the suffering of his fellow man around him.”

This complacency is an expression of hardness of heart. Cardinal Schonborn later says, “And the hardness of heart is in itself a choice of rebellion towards God.” Someone who hardens his or her heart against his or her neighbor has rebelled against God. That echoes and reminds us of the passage of The Last Judgment in Matthew 25: ‘What ever you did to the least of mine you did to me.’

This passage was so close to the heart of Mother Teresa of Calcutta who made her whole life mission to be that of picking people up out of the gutter. She didn’t only pick people out of the literal gutter, in the sense of the slums, but out of the gutter of any depression. She picked people up out of the sorrow of feeling unlovable. She went out and reached out to those who were most in need and who felt unloved. St. Thérèse is a great prophet of Merciful Love, and she was one of the great inspirations of Mother Teresa of Calcutta and after whom Mother Teresa received her name.

I want to refer to the book by Father Michael Gaitley: 33 days to Merciful Love: A Retreat With St. Thérèse. This book is his sequel to 33 Days to Morning Glory, one of the most popular ways of consecrating ourselves to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and to live a life committed to Jesus Christ. Gaitley made the Total Consecration to Mary, as originally authored by Saint Louis de Montfort, and presents it in a new, more modern tone. Saint Louis de Monfort’s style is older and similar to The Imitation of Christ. Both works are solid and grounded but sometimes very difficult to digest by our post-modern ears.

The first idea from Fr. Gaitley is in regards to how we relate to St. Thérèse. Father Gaitley rightly points out that St. Thérèse doesn’t always make a great first impression. In fact, he says “I’ve often heard that when people first meet her in her writings, they think ‘I can’t relate to her.’ They say, ‘What do I have in common with a girl who grew up in sheltered home, lived in a cloistered convent and died at just 24 years old?’ But then as they get to know her more they will often say, ‘I relate to her more than to any other saint.'”

I’ve found that to be very, very true not only in my own life but in those of many others.

Father Gaitley continues to say, “We relate to Thérèse because she is real. She is not a plaster statue high on a pedestal. In fact, we get the sense that she is right down here in the grittiness of ordinary life with the rest of us. During her life she wasn’t famous or well known. Indeed, her time in the convent truly was a hidden life full of the daily darkness we all experience. Yet, she is a great saint. But her stand-out sanctity is that she did little things with great love.” Mother Teresa’s mantra: ‘Do great things with great love’ came from St.Thérèse, and even Saint Teresa of Avila said the same thing, as all the saints do.

Father Gaitley writes, “Yes, in the midst of an ordinary mundane life she had extraordinary faith, hope, and love that are accessible to us all. As St.Thérèse herself put it, ‘Why should this treasure not be yours?'” – namely the treasures of faith hope and love. In the midst of ordinary and sometimes mundane life, we must allow ourselves to do little things with great love. Doing so allows the great love of Jesus into our hearts, so that He becomes our primary inspiration and motivation that sustains us. Finally, Father Gaitley says about Thérèse, “like most of us she not only knew herself to be weak and imperfect, but she also knew what was like to live in an age of secularism and doubt.”

This reminds me of the rich man’s response in the gospel. The rich man says, ‘This is so terrible. Please Abraham, do me a favor. Send somebody to my brothers because my brothers are just as bad off as I was. Send somebody from the dead who will shake them up, wake them up and scare the hell out of them’ so to speak. ‘They really need a good rattling in order for them to wake up.’ Abraham responds ‘Even if someone were raised from the dead, if they did not listen to the prophets, they would not be moved.’

Who was raised from the dead? Jesus. This story is about believing in the resurrection of Jesus. If someone isn’t willing to settle in simple faith to the truth of what was spoken by God’s prophets, then scaring them into faith isn’t going to work.

Faith comes alive and is awakened by attraction, not by fear or by hell and brimstone. Faith is awakened by Love. And if people are not attracted to it by Love, then throwing fear upon them isn’t going to last.

Think about a horrible time in our history, for example, the tragedy of 9/11. After 9/11, there was a phenomenon of churches being full because people were shaken up. They returned to their faith, whatever faith they came from, and for a time, churches had tremendous attendance because of the fear that woke our nation up. In all likelihood, most of the people who came back to church just because of the tragedy did not attend church for too long out; fear isn’t enough to produce a faith that bears fruit that lasts. It has to be motivated by something deeper. That is: the love of God.

Abraham tells us to listen to Moses and the prophets. St Thérèse of Lisieux is the great prophet of modern times, the prophet of Merciful Love. Thérèse’s legacy, as Father Gaitley points out, is that “She speaks to us in a fresh way about the heart of the gospel” which is the heart of Jesus, the heart of God. That heart of the gospel, that truth, is what sets us free to be fully who we were each meant to be in God’s plan for our lives personally.

As our Catechism says, the heart of the gospel “is the revelation in Jesus Christ of God’s Mercy to sinners.” Very simply: the revelation in Jesus Christ of God’s mercy to sinners. Father Gaitley points out that “The good news of God’s mercy for sinners is that God doesn’t love us because we are so good, because we are good enough, or because we’ve earned to be loved by God.” God loves us not because we’re so good but because He is so good. The good news is God loves us not because we deserve it, but because we desperately need it.

This is Divine Mercy. This is the gospel. (to be continued).

Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Saint Thérèse, and all Carmelite Saints, pray for us.

In following the footsteps of St. Thérèse, we ask her help in rediscovering the value and the gift of our vocation to love. This is the Year of Mercy and St.Thérèse is a very special soul, a very exceptional saint to help us rediscover the merciful face of our Father. The goal of this Year of Mercy is rediscovering the Merciful Face of our Heavenly Father. Thérèse knew this so well. In a sense, she had an advantage because her biological father was a wonderful reflection of God the Father in her life. That made it easy for her to grasp how good our Heavenly Father is.

Thérèse also had a wonderful mother, and both her parents were recently canonized. But between the age of 4 and 5, Thérèse experienced the wound of losing her mother to cancer. However, the mother that she did know gave Thérèse a foretaste and was a reflection of our spiritual mother, Our Mother in Heaven. Consequently, Thérèse’s sister, Pauline, became like a mother to her until she went into the convent, opening again in Thérèse that abandonment wound of having lost her mother. The result of this emotional wound was a terrible physical sickness in the life of Thérèse. This setback was actually a setup for God to bring about a tremendous blessing in Thérèse’s life.

But before Thérèse could experience this tremendous blessing, this grace of Jesus’s resurrection shining through the face of Mary, His mother, she experienced a terrible crisis. The crisis and the experience of this cross in her life prepared the way for the experience and breakthrough of Jesus’ blessing by the power of His victory of love. This victory of God’s love, of Jesus’ love, was communicated to Thérèse through the face of Mary Mother of Mercy, Our Lady of Victory. She was about ten years old when this happened and her life changed very drastically after the loss of her mother. She talks about that in The Story of Her Soul, her autobiography.

St Thérèse and St Teresa were both asked to write their autobiographies under obedience and both wanted their autobiographies to be Magnificats; that is, testimonies of their soul magnifying the Lord’s Mercy, recognizing that everything they had experienced was all part of God’s plan of Mercy. Everything – the good, the bad, the ugly. Every aspect of their lives, God was using to orchestrate for their sanctity, and to bring them closer to His holy love for them. That is in fact, what the Lord did for them.

By faith and through the consolation of the Holy Spirit, Thérèse was able to see God’s hand in every part and stage of her life. With the consolation of the Holy Spirit, she was able to see in faith how God’s providence had planned out everything so perfectly. While she was going through the pain of her emotional wounds, she may not have seen God’s hand that clearly, but after she had passed from it, she was put on a certain plateau of peace to be able to see the presence of God in every aspect of her life. It is with this kind of faith that Thérèse is writing her autobiography, the story of her soul, her personal history. She writes her autobiography as if her whole life was completely stamped with God’s Mercy.

The wisdom from Ecclesiastics poetically explains that ‘there is a time to gather stones and a time to scatter, a time to embrace and a time to be far from embraces. There is a time for love and a time to hate; there is a time for peace and a time for war.’ And the book says, God has put the timeless in the person’s heart. It is as if the author of Ecclesiastics is seeing the providence of God; there is a reason and a season for everything. Everything takes place according to God’s perfect timing, not our calendar. In the situations and circumstances of life, while we’re going through it, oftentimes how the pieces of the puzzle fall into place doesn’t make sense. But after we’ve passed through it and we have persevered, God can put us in a position where we can see His presence providing a provision for every problem.

In Romans 8:28 God makes a promise that He ‘makes all things work for the good of those who love him.’ God makes all things work for good – not some of the things some of the times. But in God’s plan, with His power, He makes all of the things, all of the time, eventually work for the good of those who love Him. In other words, there’s no crystal ball, there’s no magic wand, there’s no cookie-cutter answer or quick fix for every problem. But when we are trying our hardest and best to be faithful even though we do not get the telegram from heaven telling us clearly what we are to do – by faith day in and day out, carrying our cross, being loyal to the Lord – somehow, someway God will bring good out of everything. He only allows the difficulties, and sometimes even evils to enter into our lives in so far as He can see something greater coming out.

It takes great faith to be able to claim the victory of God’s love in advance and to know that God has a plan for our problems. Problems pass away and are temporal – they’re temporary. Here today and gone tomorrow. It takes great faith to not allow myself to be swallowed up, to be consumed, to be utterly decimated or defeated by problems.

‘My struggles will not have the last word over my life. The Lord who spoke the first Word will have the last Word. This problem is not going to prevail. It will not prosper. God’s plans will prosper, and His plan is to bring good out of it.’ It takes faith to claim that and to truly believe it. It takes great faith to receive it into our hearts and to be able to declare that God is with me, in the moment, which is the hardest part.

‘I might not feel it and He might seem to be far off, but God is with me. He promised and His Word is gold. He is more real than this situation. God is with me and his light will prevail over this darkness. I do not know how, I do not need to know how, but He will win in the end. It is a winnable war and the victory belongs to the Lord and because it belongs to the Lord, it belongs to me because I am His and He is mine.’ The victory is ours in advance. We need to claim that and to reinforce it.

St Thérèse teaches us how to do this because like Mary this is Thérèse’s greatness: her faith. As St. John says, “It is faith that gives us the victory over the world,” over the false promises of what is passing away. Anything that the world offers that would separate us from God’s love and his purpose for our lives will pass away. It is faith that gives us victory to be able to see beyond what’s on the surface, beyond the appearances, beyond the situation and the circumstance. God provides a greater provision and He is greater than every problem.

St Thérèse suffered from the problem of her illness as a ten-year-old. What provoked the illness? She lost her mother and that’s a significant trauma for a child. Her sister Pauline filled the gap, but when Pauline leaves for the convent, it opens up that ancient core wound in Thérèse’s life. What happened? She becomes physically ill because of an emotional wound. Then the enemy started making it worse and entered into the wound. He exploited the weakness and aggravated the symptoms and suffering. Thérèse acknowledged that.

An inner mixture of different causes and factors come together. In Thérèse’s own testimony, she says, “The sickness that overtook me certainly came from the demon. Infuriated by your entrance, Pauline, into Carmel, he wanted to take revenge on me for the wrong our family was to do in the future.” She has good insight and a spirit of discernment in knowing there is a spiritual war trying to interfere with her well-being. She continues, “The sweet Queen of Heaven was preparing to stop the storm the moment her flower was to break without any hope of recovery.”

God rescued Thérèse through Mary at the very moment she felt she could not go on any longer. The Lord allowed this trial to peak, to reach an apex where she felt like, ‘This is it, there is no turning back from here, there’s no recovery, game over.’ The breakthrough came only at the point, the last point where it felt like there was no more hope.

Have you ever felt that in your life – when you were pushed to your limit and felt you could go no more? Then things started to change and to shift? But the breakthrough didn’t come until you were broken? I’ve been there.

St. Thérèse continues with the details of her symptoms. “I began to have a constant headache. I was seized with a strange trembling. Nothing was able to stop my shaking, it lasted almost all night long. The doctor thought that I had a very serious illness and one which had never before attacked a child as young as I. Everybody was puzzled. Nobody knew what it was.”

In the midst of this she went to visit Pauline in the convent. The symptoms seemed to go away, the storm ceased, she felt consolation, and she thought she had been cured. She thought it was all over. It was a moment of respite but the worse was still to come.

She goes home, tells her family that she is fine and to leave her alone. But “The next day I had another attack similar to the first and the sickness became so grave and according to all human calculations I wasn’t to recover from it. I can’t describe this strange sickness but I am now convinced it was the work of the devil. I appeared to be almost delirious, saying things that had no meaning. I often appeared to be in a faint, not making the slightest movement. And then I would have permitted anyone to do anything he wished, even to kill me, and yet I heard everything that was said around me and can still remember everything. Once it happened that for a long time I was without the power to open my eyes… I believe the devil had received an external power over me but was not allowed to approach my soul nor my mind except to inspire me with great fears of certain things. I was absolutely terrified by everything. The little flower alone was languishing and seemed forever withered. People thought, as my father thought, that I had lost my mind and that I was going to die.”

This is serious human suffering. It doesn’t sound very pious, but it’s her real human experience. Yet God brought good out of this seemingly unredeemable illness. We might think, ‘This is too messy for God to use for the sake of our sanctity,’ but He does.

“Then came the miraculous statue of the Blessed Virgin which had already spoken to mama twice.” In other words, the family had already received graces from God through this statue. At that time, her father had made a Novena of Masses in honor of Our Lady of Victory, which was the image in their house, so that Our Lady could cure Thérèse. A miracle was necessary and Our Lady of Victory worked it on one Sunday, Pentecost Sunday

Thérèse writes, “I was suffering very much from this force and inexplicable struggle. Finding no help on earth, poor little Thérèse also turned toward the Mother of Heaven and prayed with all her heart that she take pity on her. All of a sudden, the Blessed Virgin appeared beautiful to me, so beautiful that never had I seen anything so attractive. Her face was suffused with an ineffable benevolence and tenderness. But what penetrated to the very depths of my soul was the ravishing smile of the Blessed Virgin.”

And instantly,at seeing the smile of the Virgin Mary imparted upon her soul, at that very moment, she was cured. Everyone cried out ‘Thérèse is cured’ and she writes that the “The luminous ray that had warmed her again was not to stop its favors. The healing did not act all at once but sweetly and gently it raised the little flower and strengthened her gradually to such a point that in five years she herself would enter that Carmel.”

We see that the healing power of God is ever present where there is faith and that God is in fact is able to bring the victory of His love no matter how messy the situation may seem to be, provided that we continue to cling to his great Mercy. As Dante says through St Bernard in the Divine Comedy: “Mary is the perfect reflection of the face of Christ.”

God who is Mercy is most magnified in Mary and her beauty. And in this Year of Mercy all of us are called to experience the healing of God’s merciful heart that we may rediscover the face of our Father who is merciful and that we ourselves may learn new lessons of mercy and how to share that gift with others as the Lord puts it in our lives.

Let us ask the Lord to help us to be merciful as He is merciful. That we may grow regularly in the grace that sets us free.

May the Lord bless us, protect us from all evil, and bring us to everlasting life. St. Thérèse and all our Carmelite saints, pray for us.

Editor’s Note:Today, the Solemnity of All Saints, Pope Francis is in Sweden, marking the 500th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation and to work toward unity in the Church. In a National Catholic Register article, the pope marks out a path for Christians toward holiness and to spread God’s Mercy, the Six New Beatitudes for the Modern Era. Also, the Sisters of Mercy have put together an Election Day Novena prayer for unity and healing in our divided nation and to Make Mercy Real.

The artist Fray Juan de la Miseria captures one of the main expressions of Our Holy Mother, Saint Teresa’s spirituality, on the scroll of her most famous portrait: Forever I will sing the mercies of the Lord from Psalm 89. That is ultimately what she called the story of her life, her autobiography, which she originally titled, Sing the Mercies of the Lord.

There can be no mysticism without Divine Mercy on two levels.

One: What is mysticism? Mysticism is not the alternative spirituality of secularism because secularism is very superstitious; it is pre-pagan and pre-Christian. It’s made up of all kinds of pseudo-forms of mysticism or counterfeit spirituality by people who are so taken by the ghost chasers, the supernatural, the different shows about the supernatural, the witch-hunt trials, movies about occult themes or horror movies that glamorize evil; such films make it exciting and adventurous. For example, films like The Matrix has lot of depth, but ultimately, the movie comes from New Age perspectives and ideas, yet it has often been interpreted with Christian overtones. A lot of people want mysticism, but true mysticism is based on nothing less than God’s Divine Mercy.

Two: What is mysticism for us as Christians? It is not some kind of esoteric psychic adventure or escape from reality or self-realization; it’s not any of those things. For Christians, mysticism is an immersion in the Merciful Love of God, in the Merciful Love of the Lord.

The foundational piece of mysticism for Christians is to recognize that we are sinners. The majority of secular society does not believe that. The great venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen would say, “Many in our culture today think that we are immaculately conceived, that there is no such thing as sin.” As one of the Popes of the past century mentioned, “the greatest sin of all is the denial of the existence of sin because then we can open the doors to practically anything and excuse it, justify it and tolerate it, in the name of being part of the intellectual elite, the progressive, and the open minded. We don’t know what doors we are opening.”

Spiritual maturity starts with conversion and having the humility to recognize our sins; we all know that we can be baptized and go to Holy Communion regularly, and not be changed. We can be as rude as ever, as grumpy, grouchy, and gossipy as ever because the Sacraments are not magic. Secularism can be fascinated by magic, but God doesn’t operate on those terms -the devil does, but God doesn’t. The sacraments are always respectful of a person’s free will and of the reciprocity of that person’s response; there is never an imposing of power or an imparting of knowledge, unless there is a surrender of faith. This is the big difference between Eve and Mary.

Eve sought after knowledge and power for her sake. Mary says, “I believe…be it done unto me according to Your Word.” Mary didn’t need to understand. She said, ‘I don’t know how this is going to happen, I don’t need to know, and I don’t even need to be the one to do it,’ but “I am the handmaid of the Lord, be it done undo me according to Your Word.” She was not seeking knowledge and power for her own sake but to be the instrument of God’s knowledge and power in the world.

The difference between humility and pride boils down to the spiritual battle and conversion. Conversion is necessary for Christ to work in us. For the Sacraments to have the effect in us, for us to be able to grow up, we need conversion. Conversion opens up new capacities within us that were previously untapped. Conversion taps into something supernatural inside each of us, giving us an ability and an openness for experiencing a richer quality of life on another level.

The Psalms say, “Taste and see how good is the Lord.” In Adoration we say, “You have given them bread from Heaven containing all sweetness within it, all that is delicious.” The Eucharist contains all that is delicious about Divine Love in Christ, and we’re part of that love relationship. The meaning of who we are, the dignity of the human person is all wrapped up in discovering and tasting the beauty and purpose of our very existence from the inside out.

Conversion brings us to a new awareness of what it means to be made in God’s image, in a way that can take on life altering meaning. Coming to know the relevance of God’s truth for our lives brings about conversion. This knowledge brings about a metanoia…a metamorphosis…a transformation.

This metanoia, this being transformed, as St. Paul says, ‘by the renewal of our mind,’ is so deep and profound. Our goal in life is to be transformed by the renewal of our mind so that we may know what is God’s will. God’s will is what is good, pleasing, and perfect. God’s will is what is true, good, and beautiful, and not that which is conformed to this culture and age.

Metanoia is a deep and all embracing change of mind and heart at the root of our understanding, at the root of our desiring; how we relate to what is most important and what is essential about life; how we relate to the ultimate things of what is the good to be sought after, and the evil to be avoided.

Scripture talks about this revolution as a new birth. Jesus says, “Unless you are born again of the spirit, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” When we are born again of the spirit, the true self, which is a gift of the spirit, begins to emerge. This gift of the Spirit enables us to attain mature spiritual adulthood “to the extent of the full stature of Christ,” as Saint Paul writes. By the gift of the Spirit, we are given a new birth that enables us to develop to the point of attaining full spiritual adulthood; we are no longer infants.

In Ephesians, Saint Paul explains that to be a spiritual infant “…is to be tossed by waves and swept away by winds of every teaching arising from human trickery, and from their cunning and deceitful scheming. Living the truth in love, we should grow in every way into Him, to the full stature of Christ.” What we see in Jesus as Risen Lord, what we see before that in his Transfiguration is speaking something about us…about our ultimate purpose and destiny. We’re going to have resurrected bodies if we persevere in faith, through the grace of God. Everything we see about Christ, the supernatural destiny is going to be given to us…we’re going to share in it.

St. Paul says that we, as the imago Dei, the image of God, the human person is the imago Dei, and we are predestined to be filled with all the utter fullness of God. That is straight from St. Paul in Colossians; we are predestined to be filled with all the utter fullness of God. That’s just not pious hyperbole, it’s not just emotionalism or exaggeration, this is a reality…that the saints in a special way embody for us. They show what’s possible for all of us, and even if we don’t finish the course in this life, God will fill us with the utter fullness of Himself in the next life if we persevere in faith and in grace.

A lot of times, we don’t notice the growth. Sometimes we wonder if we have even grown! We might say, “I’m confessing the same stuff! Have I even grown in anyway?” It feels like we’re going in circles like the Israelites in the desert; they kept on going in circles, and only the younger generation found the Promised Land. Sometimes we can feel that way. We wonder…is there growth? Growth is an imperceptible process often times, but with conversion and the Merciful Love of God, it will happen.

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